Police Allowed To Hang Onto Seized Computers For Anti-Piracy Group, Despite No Gov't Prosecution

from the that's-bad dept

We were just noting that the IFPI thinks it's going to start seizing computers directly to get evidence of unauthorized file sharing, and wondering how that would work. At least in the UK, they may have just received some legal support. Over the summer, we wondered why an anti-piracy group in the UK was given access to and allowed to keep computers from a criminal investigation into an online service, called Surfthechannel, accused of unauthorized file sharing. The police seized the computers, but decided not to pursue criminal charges. It never made much sense that private, industry-backed anti-piracy group FACT was a major part of the criminal investigation, as they're quite the biased party. They were given seized computers as a part of this investigation -- and once the police decided not to pursue criminal charges, FACT kept the machines, saying it was considering a civil suit. However, the lawyers for Surfthechannel noted that the police and FACT had no right to keep the seized machines after the decision was made not to pursue criminal charges.

Apparently (and unfortunately) a judge disagrees. A reader alerts us (via comments on a totally separate story, rather than a submission -- not sure why) to the news that the judge in the case has said that police have every right to retain seized computers, even after they've decided not to pursue criminal charges. The judges noted that the law allows police the retain anything seized "so long as is necessary in all the circumstances" and then ruled that the potential of a civil suit from FACT was one of those "circumstances" that qualified. It's difficult to see how that makes any sense, but so ruled the court.

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IFPI: If Lawsuits Aren't Working In Denmark, We'll Seize Computers To Get Evidence

from the um,-wow dept

We just wrote about how the Danish anti-piracy group was dropping its lawsuits against individual file sharers after realizing that Danish law made it almost impossible for the industry to win those cases. However, as pointed out by brokep, the international wing of the recording industry, the IFPI, wasted little time in trying to spin the news in its favor (Google translation of the original). The IFPI insists that the lawsuits won't stop, but just that the anti-piracy organization was realizing it needed more detailed evidence -- and this means that it will now start seizing computers to get evidence. Now, the Google translation trips up over the word "beslagslaeggelse," but multiple Danish speakers have confirmed that the word means "seize" or "confiscate." Of course, that raises some questions about why a private organization representing record labels has any right to seize computers of individuals. I think they were better off when they just admitted they were going to give up on the counterproductive legal strategy.

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What Happened To 'If You Didn't Pay For It, It's Stealing'?

from the except-when-we-do-it dept

For years, the entertainment industry has pushed a propaganda line in its "education" programs that are used in schools: "if you haven't paid for it, you stole it." Of course, that's not actually true. But, if the entertainment industry wants to claim that, shouldn't it live by those rules too? Apparently, the managing director of Dutch anti-piracy group BREIN, that's currently involved in numerous lawsuits against file sharing sites, is happily talking up the fact that he now has possession of a laptop from a "hacker" and that it was confiscated from that hacker. So, clearly, BREIN didn't pay for it. Doesn't that mean it was stolen by their own definition? While the police may have the right to confiscate goods, BREIN is not the police. It's a private industry organization, that claims it's against theft, but doesn't seem to mind participating in "getting things without paying for it" when it has the chance.

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Forget Snow Days, Kids Get Two Days Of No Classes Due to A Computer Glitch

from the how-did-we-ever-deal-before? dept

Apparently the Prince George County high school spent over $4 million on a nice new computer system... and the system is so buggy that students have been unable to attend class for the first two days of school, since the computer system refuses to give them their schedules. The kids still went to school, but just got to hang out in the gym or hallways since no one seemed to be able to figure out where they were supposed to go. The thing that gets me... is how did they get to the beginning of the school year and just realize this? I know I went to school way back before all this was computerized, and we got our schedules sent in the mail a few weeks before school. You have to think that the school would have realized this was a problem earlier and at least figured out some sort of manual way to get schedules to people?

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Supreme Court Won't Hear Case Over Computer Tech's Right To Search Your Computer

from the older-ruling-stands dept

A few years back, we wrote about the case where a guy was arrested for possessing child pornography after techs at Circuit City found child porn on his computer, while they were installing a DVD player. The guy insisted that the evidence shouldn't be admissible since the techs shouldn't have been snooping through his computer -- and a lower court agreed. The appeals court, however, reversed, noting that the guy had given Circuit City the right to do things on his computer -- including testing out the newly installed software (which is how the tech claims he found the video). The guy appealed to the Supreme Court, who has declined to hear the case, meaning that the ruling stands for the time being. So, basically, if you hand your computer over to someone else for repairs, at least in some jurisdictions, they may have pretty free rein in terms of what they're allowed to access on your computer.

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FBI Unable To Properly Manage Terrorist Watch List

from the check-on-that-new-computer dept

For the better part of this decade, we've covered the massive screw-ups the FBI had in updating its computer system. This was the system that was many years late, way way way over budget and useless at tracking down terrorists. It's the same system that, when a computer scientist was asked to review the it, he claimed (no joke) that it would be a good time to go on a crime spree the day the FBI switched over.

While the FBI has since moved forward with another system, it's reasonable to question the quality of its computer systems. So, it shouldn't come as much of a surprise that the FBI appears to be unable to manage its terror watch list. According to a report by the Inspector General:

We found that the FBI failed to nominate many subjects in the terrorism investigations that we sampled, did not nominate many others in a timely fashion, and did not update or remove watchlist records as required.... We believe that the FBI's failure to consistently nominate subjects of international and domestic terrorism investigations to the terrorist watchlist could pose a risk to national security.

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When It Comes To Today's Cell Phones, The Hardware Is The Easy Part

from the new-markets,-old-problems dept

Faced with stagnating sales as consumers upgrade their computers with less frequency, several PC makers are eyeing the smartphone market as their next growth target. It makes sense to them: their technology is getting smaller and smaller, while demand for more powerful handsets is growing. And smartphones are basically becoming tiny laptops, right?

Well, not exactly.

Smartphones and computers might be sharing more components and technology these days, but just as the PC hardware market became a commodity one, the handset hardware market is moving that way, too. The hardware is the easy part: there are dozens of ODMs around that are more than willing to design and build handsets for anybody with the cash. The real innovation these days is in software -- and designing great mobile user interfaces, as well as applications and services, will determine who wins in the market. Consider the iPhone: its tech specs, perhaps beyond its touchscreen, aren't head and shoulders above other high-end handsets, and are surpassed by a number of competitors' devices. But what's won so many fans is its software, in particular its user interface, its web browser and the App Store. Making the leap from PC to smartphone isn't an easy one -- just ask the likes of Microsoft, whose dominance of the desktop hasn't lead to a similar position for Windows Mobile.

Carlo Longino is an expert at the Insight Community. To get insight and analysis from Carlo Longino and other experts on challenges your company faces, click here.

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Yet Another Truth Telling Computer... Haven't We Seen This Before?

from the believe-it-when-I-see-it dept

For years and years and years, we've been hearing about hugely ambitious projects to try to create "thinking" machines that can absorb a ton of information and spit out facts. Yet, every time, when the true tests begin, the project never gets very far, for a variety of reasons. First, the technology usually isn't that good. Having a computer decide what is "truthful" isn't exactly an easy problem -- especially when plenty of humans can't even agree on what is, and what is not, truthful. Second, these companies have failed to come up with a reason why anyone would really want/need to use such a thing. After all, how useful is a "truth" machine compared to a simple search engine? These projects come and go, and there's always someone insisting that the holy grail is on its way. The latest is Stephen Wolfram, something of a high tech oddity. He built a tremendous success with Mathematica and clearly is a sort of techie's techie. That's why it's not as easy to simply dismiss his claims to have created just such a knowledge system. That said, I'm still not convinced there's a particularly good use case for the product -- and, even if it's much better than what's come before, chances are it still has an incredibly long way to go. Wolfram is a super smart guy -- and I do hope he's figured out how to really create such a thing, but given how many similar claims we've seen in the past, it seems only wise to express some significant skepticism.

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One More Reason Not To Blindly Trust What A Computer Tells You

from the this-site-is-sooooooo-dangeorus dept

By now, you've probably heard the news that Google had a bit of a "glitch" this past weekend, whereby it warned people that every single site in existence (including Google) was rated as potentially dangerous and could put malware on your computer. It lasted for about an hour Saturday morning, causing amused chatter around the web. But, of course, it does highlight one key issue: whenever we end up with various "automated" warning systems, we tend to start believing what the systems tell us -- even when we know they're fallible. It's something worth remembering -- not to say that computer models are bad, just that we almost always underestimate how much weight people put on them once they're in place, no matter how much we intuitively understand that it's just a model.

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EFF And ACLU Sue FBI Over Seizure Of Activists' Computers

from the 4th-amendment-anyone? dept

The EFF and the ACLU has filed yet another lawsuit against the government, highlighting another scary abuse of power that feels straight out of a police state, rather than the free society we supposedly live in. Specifically, the FBI and other law enforcement officials raided the offices of two different activist organizations and seized all of their computers. There are two issues here that are important. First, if the FBI was concerned about the computers being used in commission of a crime, they easily could have followed the same policies used to get records off of computers at libraries (part of the issue is that these organizations offer public access computers to folks visiting their offices). The second issue is that both organizations act as publishers, and federal law makes it clear that the government can't just seize computers of publishers except in extremely narrow circumstances. So, in either circumstance, the Feds should not have seized the computers.

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But The Machine Said So...

from the relying-on-technology-too-much dept

There was an interesting article recently in the NY Times about various patients who had physical problems misdiagnosed due to a bad MRI scan. Apparently, a number of people continued to suffer from very serious problems for many months, until they finally returned and had another (better) MRI done, which found the problem the first one missed. It's certainly no secret that an MRI (or a technician reading the output of an MRI) might miss something, but it's interesting to see people whose natural inclination is to simply trust that initial ruling. We still have this infatuation with the idea that the machines are always right, so if an MRI says there's no break, it must be true. At some point, though, we need to kick that habit, and recognize that the output of such machines is also fallible, at times.

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Apparently The Financial Crisis Is The Fault Of Flickering Computer Screens

from the say-what-now? dept

From Paul Kedrosky we find one of the most idiotic theories on where the whole financial crisis came from, out of a laughably stupid interview with author Tom Wolfe. Apparently, the problem wasn't complex securities, massive leverage, unsupportable subprime mortgage giveaways or anything of the sort. No sir. It was all those flickering screens on computers that make financial types not want to pay attention:

The whole thing, starting with the subprime, is the fault of the computer. I was just talking to a banker the other day, and not that long ago, 20 years ago, an investment banking house, let's say, Lehman Brothers, when it got a package of mortgages, they would go through every mortgage, every single one, and they'd throw out the ones that just seemed absurd, they just wouldn't accept them. Things used to arrive on paper. Today things arrive on a screen, and a screen is back lit, and one of the biggest pains in the neck is trying to read something dully written and complicated on a computer screen. It will drive you nuts -- I mean, try it sometime. Now they say, "Oh, to hell with it," and they just accept the whole package. And if it hadn't been for that, they'd be going over each loan. What's happened is the backward march of technology.

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Garbage In, Financial Crisis Out

from the so-much-for-the-quants dept

With everyone trying to figure out just what went wrong to cause the rather spectacular financial mess Wall Street finds itself in these days, Saul Hansell over at the NY Times wanted to find out why all the sophisticated risk management quant algorithms that Wall St. has been so big on lately failed to warn of impending doom. His answer, basically, is that people on Wall St. were lying to the algorithms, coming up with ways to purposely enter data such that the risk seemed much less than it actually was -- in order to let them keep pushing the boundary. Then, it became a situation where people start relying on the computers just because the computer says so -- even though the data is bad. This happens time and time again. Even when people know that computers make mistakes, it's just so convenient to have a computer "confirm" your thinking that you start ignoring other warning signs.

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Court Says Employees Have No Expectation Of Privacy For Stuff On Company Owned Computers

from the well,-duh dept

A court ruling in New Jersey doesn't seem all that surprising, but may lead to more legal questions in the future. The case involved an employee who was stealing from his employer. The employee was eventually found guilty of the theft, but argued that the evidence used against him was gathered illegally, in that it was in a password protected file on his company-owned laptop. It's actually a little more confusing, as the guy actually claimed the laptop was his, but that turned out not to be true. He had originally purchased the computer using his employers credit card... but then still pretended the computer was his personal laptop. Yet, later, he "sold" the laptop to the company -- so realistically, the company had bought the laptop twice.

So, then the legal question was whether or not the guy had a "reasonable expectation of privacy" for stuff stored on that laptop, especially in a password protected file. The court ruled no, that an employee does not have a reasonable expectation for privacy, and that, effectively, anything on the computer is fair game for the employer (even if it's password protected).

You can understand the reasoning there, as it makes sense that a company should feel free to go through the contents of a computer it owns. However, it does raise some other questions. Earlier this summer, we wrote about another case in which a company continued to read the personal email of a fired employee, because he had left his personal online email account logged in from the company-owned laptop. While that seems different, is it really that big a leap from data stored on the local hard drive, to data stored on a remote hard drive, accessed via a web browser? It does, however, start to become a much trickier question, especially as more data and apps move from the local laptop into the "cloud" and as work and life boundaries blur.

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Why Not Just Computerize Sports Refs And Umps?

from the who-needs-the-human-element? dept

Last week, Major League Baseball introduced instant replay for the first time (oddly, MLB rushed the introduction mid-season, with no real testing), which has many wondering if the rather "human" element of umpires making bad calls will be a lost element of the game. While it can suck when such wrong calls go against your team, the umpires' ability to screw up has always been a part of the appeal to many fans of the game. However, Farhad Manjoo over at Slate is wondering about the inevitable next step: moving to completely automated umpires and referees in various sports. He compares the Hawk Eye system that is used in tennis to determine whether a ball is in or out to the efforts in MLB, but points out that computerized systems are far from perfect. In fact, they can lead to some highly questionable results, such as a situation in which every single human observer believed a ball was out, and even television replays showed the ball appeared out -- but Hawk Eye claimed it was in, and that the problem was that human eyes weren't good enough to see if the ball was really in or out. At that point, it makes you wonder whether or not such a machine ruling really makes sense.

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Ok, How About A $12 Computer?

from the that's-more-like-it dept

Last week, we wrote about supposed efforts in India to build a $10 computer. However, Indian officials later explained that there was a typo in the transcript to the speech in question, and they really meant a $100 computer. But don't think others aren't trying for cheaper computers. The Raw Feed points out that some folks at MIT (ironically, the home of OLPC founder Nicholas Negroponte) are working on building $12 computers for the developing world, using the old Apple II as a base. It seems like an interesting plan, though still quite far away from reality. But, still, in this space, more competition is good, no matter how much Negroponte wishes he were the only provider.

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Should The Next President Use A Computer?

from the series-of-tubes dept

Much has been made of John McCain's status as a self-proclaimed "computer illiterate." Juxtaposed with his rival, the Blackberry-wielding, iPod-listening Barack Obama, McCain's inexperience with all things digital have raised concerns that he is out of touch with normal Americans. Although McCain is reportedly attempting to use computers more often, a bigger question remains unsolved: should the President of the United States use a computer?

Lee Gomes at the Wall Street Journal seems to think the best policy is to "avoid computers." Among such significant insights as any computer should remain outside the Oval Office "since it wouldn't match the furniture," is a recommendation that the President be limited to 20 minutes of computer time "to keep up with the common folk" by reading blogs, playing Solitaire or watching YouTube. But, don't get carried away! "The severe time rationing is necessary because a computer, far from making you more productive, instead loads you down with things to do, and it's important for the machine to know who is boss."

It is slightly shocking that the WSJ would have you believe that computers are only good for keeping up-to-date on the latest cute cat videos (as long as you don't get bogged down in pop-ups -- which Gomes warns is how most computer users waste away their time). Of course the President should delegate menial tasks to staffers, but Gomes and others who think that technology is peripheral to the role of the Commander-in-Chief miss the point. Computer literacy isn't about "being in touch" with the "common folk," it is about understanding the foundation of the knowledge economy. The next administration will need to correctly address important policies with technology at their root, and if the leader doesn't understand the fundamental potential and differences of digital technology, the results will be much more catastrophic than wasting time deleting spam.

Kevin Donovan is an expert at the Insight Community. To get insight and analysis from Kevin Donovan and other experts on challenges your company faces, click here.

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Musicians Play Music Better Than Computers

from the in-case-you-didn't-know-that dept

We all know that computers can beat humans at chess these days, but they're apparently still falling short of humans in some areas -- such as music. This is unlikely to surprise many people, but a study of how people's brains reacted to music that was played by human musicians vs. computers found that our brains respond more to the music from musicians. Basically, it sounds like our brains can detect the fact that humans play music with more feeling, and we respond accordingly. So now who's going to program computer musicians to understand the meaning of "Once more... with feeling!"

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German Courts Say That Info On Your Computer Is Private

from the just-say-nein dept

The German government has been pushing for the ability to spy on computers of suspected criminals and terrorists. A little over a year ago, a court came down firmly against a proposal to allow German authorities to use spyware on computers of suspected criminals to gather information. Now another German court has ruled on a similar issue, noting that using surveillance systems to spy on personal computers would be a violation of privacy rights. While German authorities are already complaining about how this will make it difficult for them to catch criminals and terrorists, it sounds like they are overreacting. Courts will still be able to approve such surveillance if authorities can show evidence of why the surveillance is needed. This seems completely reasonable, as laws shouldn't be made solely to make it easy to catch criminals. They should be made to protect the rights of individuals. When those two things come into conflict, the rights of individuals should prevail.

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SEC Computer System Not So Great For Catching Insider Trading

from the whoops dept

Well if the FBI can have a terrible computer system that's useless at catching terrorists, should it really be much of a surprise that the SEC has a computer system that isn't particularly useful at catching insider trading? That, at least, is the word from the Government Accountability Office (GAO) in its latest report to Congress. Apparently the GAO found that the SEC's computer system can't even search referrals from its own investigators concerning insider trading. Of course, what's not clear (at least from the article) is how much the SEC paid for this computer system... and how much more it will cost to get one that's actually useful.

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